Crawford’s concluding remark on this panel was that Europe has a clear choice when it comes to AI: to passively acquiesce to American techbro hegemony or to actively refuse AI. As she put it bluntly, accept or fight!

vision is not future-facing

This is Vibe Theory: an expression of elite anxiety masquerading as a politics of resistance. It is also exemplary of what the tragic ur-European philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the “aestheticization of politics,” which in this case is the result of the odd incentives that ensue when the art world makes the invitations, pays the speaker... See more

By the end, I think I was the only one arguing that Europe should build an AI Stack (or something even better) rather than insisting that, in essence, AI is superproblematic and thus Europe should resist doing this superproblematic thing.

Put plainly, for Europe to succeed in realizing its most impactful contributions to the planetary computational stack, it must stop talking itself out of advancement and instead cultivate a new philosophy of computation that invents the concepts needed to compose the world, not just deconstruct it or preserve it like a relic.

Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance and Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach to AI is not working.